How To Create a Mixtape With Spotify

If you run a club in Second Life and have a blog to go along with it, then you need content that engages visitors and helps to reflect what your club is all about. One way to do this is to add mixtapes (or playlists) to your blog and Spotify is an ideal service to use for this. The process of creating a mixtape for your blog is simple, and the steps are outlined here.

We assume that you have already signed up to Spotify - if you haven't then its simply a matter of creating a username and password and you're in.

Name the Mixtape

1/ The first step is to create a name for your mixtape. At the top right of the Spotify page click on 'New Playlist' then in the space below type in the name and click the green 'Create' button (see above). You have now created a playlist.

 Search For Tracks

2/ Now you need to add some tracks to your mixtape, so you need to search for appropriate music. Click on the search icon to the right of the Spotify webpage, and type in what you want to search on. You can search for musicians, bands, track titles, and of course genres of music. Make a selection from the search results.

 

Add Tracks To The Mixtape

3/ When you click on an item from the search results you'll see a list of tracks. To add one to your mixtape right click on one then select 'Add to...' and then click on the name of your mixtape from the drop down menu. Repeat step two and three until you have all the tracks you want for your mixtape.

Create the Mixtape For Your Blog

4/ When you have added all of the tracks to your mixtape it is time to get the code to embed it on your blog.

First, Right click on the name of your mixtape at the top of the Spotify webpage then click on 'Copy Spotify URL' .  Now go to this new Spotify page.

5/ On the new page look for the area shown above. In the space provided paste the URL you copied. Now click in the space below this and copy the embed code, making sure first that the example code shown on the page has updated to your code.

Embedding the Mixtape

Go the the page (or create it) where you want to embed the mixtape. In blogger you'll need to switch to HTML view where you will just need to paste the code, then save the page. The result will look something like the mixtape below. You can click on each tune shown here to play it.

After pasting the embed code for this mixtape, in HTML view I tweaked it a little. Firstly I increased the height to 460 and the width to 380 (the places to do this are clearly visible in the code). Also to centre the mixtape on the page I added this above the embed code:

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">

 Then after the code I added a closing div Statement: </div>. The entire code looks like this:

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe src="https://embed.spotify.com/?uri=https://play.spotify.com/user/chillybears/playlist/63dY5IYWpNufr7d2GqL07c" width="380" height="460" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true"></iframe>
</div>

Once you have embedded the mixtape to your blog your visitors can listen to all the tracks. If there is a drawback to this it is that visitors will need to sign up to Spotify to listen to your mixtape, but as this takes very little time or effort it doesn't need to be a problem.

Also, Spotify plays ads inbetween a few tracks, but that seems a small price to pay to have music of your choice legally on your blog. Another advantage is that if you update your mixtape on Spotify, it will also automatically update on your blog.

Share your Mixtapes

Once you have your mixtapes set up on your blog, share them with us. Follow Chilly Bear on Spotify and we'll follow you in return so we can keep up to date and enjoy your choice in music. Don't forget to come down and visit us at Chilly Bear  in Second Life - we'd love to see you there.